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Measuring the Rabid Puppies Effect on the 2017 Hugo Ballot

[Updated April 23 and May 17. See explanations of changes in Best Fan Artist category below.] The 2017 Hugo ballot released April 4 contains 1312 11 finalists that were on Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies slate.

While 16 of the 22 entries on his slate (72%) received enough votes to be finalists, threefour five were ruled ineligible. So only 59%54% 50% of his slate has made the final ballot.

Six Seven of 17 Hugo Award categories are Puppy free. (The total includes one category where there was no Rabid Puppy candidate, and excludes the Campbell Award, which is not a Hugo).

Interpreting the voting range statistics published by the committee, it would be reasonable to estimate 80-90 voters supported the Rabid Puppies slate this year.

Here is a breakdown of the slate’s effectiveness by category.

Items in BLUE were on the Rabid Puppies slate and made the final ballot.

Items in REDwere on the slate and received enough votes to be finalists but were RULED INELIGIBLE.

Items in BLACK body text were on the slate and failed to get enough votes to be finalists.

RABID PUPPIES SLATE

BEST NOVEL

An Equation of Almost Infinite Complexity by J. Mulrooney (Castalia House)

“The Winds of Winter”, Game of Thrones, Miguel Sapochnik, David Benioff & D. B. Weiss– received enough votes to be nominated, but was rendered ineligible because a single show cannot have more than two finalists, and presumably the two Game of Thrones nominees on the ballot had more votes.

BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST

Tomek Radziewicz – received enough votes to be a finalist, but was ruled ineligible because of no qualifying publications in 2016

JiHun Lee – likewise, – received enough votes to be a finalist, but was ruled ineligible because of no qualifying publications in 2016

Update: The post has been corrected to so that it no longer shows P. Alexander as a Best Editor – Short Form nominee, and the percentages have been recalculated. // 04/23/2017: Alex Garner was ruled ineligible by the Hugo Administrator after the artist stated all his 2016 work was professional. // 05/17/2017: Mansik Yang was disqualified by the Hugo Administrators after the artist informed them he did not have any non-professional work published in 2016.

DP Richard: There’s no evidence that the Dragon Awards get tens of thousands of votes, and there’s very good evidence they got a trivial number of votes in the book categories — one Dragon Award winner, Souldancer, couldn’t even muster enough votes to rank in the top three of the Conservative Libertarian Fiction Alliance Book of the Year Award.

One thing that I am consistently amazed at is how little the Pups understand about award prestige. Awards don’t gain prestige because of the voting pool they count as their electorate. There is nothing about a “free online voting system” that will make an award more prestigious than another. People can freely vote for the Locus Award online, and that hasn’t made that award surpass the Hugos in terms of notability. The Nebula Award is voted on exclusively by the members of the SFWA, and they are still regarded as being a substantial award. No one claims the People’s Choice Award is more desirable than the Oscar because the People’s Choice Award is voted on by fans in a public poll.

Why an award is regarded as being prestigious is more than a matter of counting the noses of those who can vote in it. Award prestige comes down, in large part, to simple perception: If an award is regarded as being notable, it is notable, and if it is not, then it isn’t. No amount of foot-stomping and complaining by Pups is going to change this, or change the fact that the Hugos are regarded as the premier award in science fiction and fantasy.

Finally, the notion that awards are a zero-sum game is also bizarre. They aren’t. The existence of the Nebula doesn’t diminish the Hugo. The fact that the World Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award, and the BSFA Award, and the Prometheus Award are all out there doesn’t harm the various other awards. Even if the Dragon Award becomes as successful as its proponents hope (as unlikely as that seems right now), that won’t harm the Hugo Awards. That’s not how awards work. Instead, awards tend to feed on one another, with one award engendering interest in other awards, which in turn engender interest back to the original award, and so on. The only thing the Dragon Award is really likely to do is further entrench the Hugos in their position of prominence.

Holy crapolini, just noticed this. Has anyone seen the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode titles The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award? Quick synopsis of the premise: “The Gang” is upset that they’ve never won the Best Bar in Philadelphia award. At first they are just sort of grousing about how much they don’t care, really, and then they start talking about how it feels a little “aggressive” that they’ve never won the award, and then they complain that it’s rigged anyway, and you have to kiss ass to win, and then they decide to game the system to win the award, and as the opening scene ends, one of them says: “I want to be very clear about something. This literally means nothing to me.”

@Niall: British politeness: they’d let him keep the “Sir”. But I don’t think the Beeb/Discovery are keen to advertise “Planet Earth, Presented by Sir Boaty McBoatface.” Lacks a bit of gravitas.

It’s possible the Dragon Awards had tens of thousands of votes, but not tens of thousands of voters. But we’ll never know since they’re too embarrassed, too disorganized, or both to release the voting totals. They were promised and it’s been months now. We’ll never see them.

Unlike the Hugos, which release the voting totals the minute the ceremony is over. For those of you who’ve never attended, a special issue of the newszine, quite literally hot off the press (still warm to the touch) is usually handed out by a volunteer at each of the exits from the room where the ceremony is held. It has a list of the winners, and the nice tables of statistics, showing how everyone placed. Other gofers run copies to the con suite, the party area, dealer’s room, etc. Someone (usually Kevin) puts it up online right away. Now THAT’s transparency, and builds confidence in an award’s credibility.

@ULTRAGOTHA: That’s not a complete concom list; I know several people working it who aren’t on there. Although they may be counted as underlings of division heads, so only the topmost level of concom is listed. And your Mrs. has good taste.

I’d need a lot of explaining about 3SV. I like the idea, but is the time frame workable?

I like my sunken ship and would happily interact with anyone who isn’t a bully disguised as a victim, but, hey, whatevs. Also, Dragon Awards didn’t release their voting numbers. President Trump notwithstanding, you just can’t make shit up and present it as a fact.

I know, right? Seeing what sort of crap makes its way onto the Bestseller lists and Peoples’ Choice type of awards, I’m quite happy to have 3,000 people who read massive quantities of spec fic books and are quite knowledgeable about the genre be the ones deciding the Hugo Awards.

Tens of thousands of people having opinions is a very different thing than tens of thousands of people having well-informed opinions.

Minor correction on Worldcon Hugo results newszines. As someone who was editor one year (where it was *very* hard not to, at the pre-ceremony reception, give John Picacio a hug and whisper in his ear “I know the results. You finally won!”) and responsible for passing them out in another (“Little does most of the audience know that the several boxes next to me in the aisle have all the results…” and this was at Spokane aka the year of No Awards), it’s the case that there are two separate publications.

One has the winners and whatever else the editor is nuts enough to want to include. The year I edited, I included small pictures of the winners and stats on how many Hugos they’d won and/or been nominated for overall and in that category. That’s one double-sided page and 1500 or so are printed.

The other has all the stats, including nomination totals for all categories going down to the 5% mark and tables for all the results…including all the subsequent rounds to determine 2nd-nth places. This is around 20 or so double-sided pages, and around 20-40 are printed, as I recall. Several are placed in prominent positions outside of the Hugo ceremony (and done so right after Best Novel is announced), others are sent to the Con Suite, Hugo Losers Party, SFWA and ASFA suites, etc. where they get passed around and analyzed. These results are also put online.

The newszine editor, or someone designated by them, goes into the newszine office alone, locks the door, and writes up and prints the results edition. Before printing, they find someone to proofread, either someone else who knows the results (my editor year, the Ceremony head and I swapped proofreading duties; she proofed the zine, I proofed her result slides) or someone the powers that be OK to find out the results (that other year, the Hugo Administrator approved my being the proofreader for the edition the Newszine Editor had written).

The results stats publication is done in advance by the Hugo Administrator and the copies kept hidden until after the ceremony, because it’s a 40 page long monster too long to do at con in a locked room.

In all the furor of Puppy-ness, a fact may have been overlooked. Not only is Nora (N. K.) Jemisin up for a Hugo again this year, but so is Devi Pillai of Orbit Books, her editor. As Nora says on her blog “Give my editor a Hugo.” (The Editor Long Form category also has four other excellent finalists … and Vox Day.)

Oh yeah and re the Hugo Awards: I think it’s gonna be fun when we see the nomination and vote stats for, say, Neil Gaiman, Deadpool and China Miéville, and compare them to, say, John C. Wright, Stix Hiscock and J. Mulrooney (oh my, what elevated company JCW is in these days thanks to his good friend Ted!)

@Kendall – yet that episode is from 2013! Time traveling! I only summed up the opening scene, too – there are even more bizarre correlations between the *Puppies and that episode as it goes. I think It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia was merely expressing an archetype, one the *Puppies fit into perfectly.

The shortlists contain some fine works, and at this point I no longer give a flying coitus about the rabid puppies slate, and I certainly don’t care if they include works that I think deserve an award. As for the Dragon Awards, who knows? They potentially have a much bigger voting base, being free and all, and Dragon Con has come to dwarf the Worldcon. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

If this is the Alex Garner I looked up, then he is a professional artist. He is very good, but in the wrong category. The same goes for Mansik Yang.

Sloppy work by Beale. If he had placed them in the correct category instead of the artists deemed not eligible, then they might have a shot at winning the award. Because they are really very, very good.